Austentatious remains one of the sharpest improv shows on the British circuit, consistently funny, impressively slick and a reliably excellent night out.
Austentatious, the much-loved British institution of improvised comedy and theatrical silliness, is now in its 14th year and marking the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth.
We attended on a night featuring Stephen Mangan as the guest star and honestly could not have picked a better date. Mangan slipped seamlessly into the experienced cast and delivered some of the most memorable moments of the evening, including the immortal naming of Felicity Cockblock, a steady stream of ball-based jokes and an enthusiastic jig. He was an absolute highlight and if this is anything to go by, other special guests Mel Giedroyc and Paterson Joseph were surely just as strong.
Austentatious is exactly what it promises. An extravagant, knowingly ostentatious performance blending Austen-esque storytelling, classic British humour and genuinely top tier improvisation. Improv shows can often sag under the weight of indulgent sketches that add little and test an audience’s patience, but this cast are masters of keeping things tight. Scenes are neatly wrapped up before they overstay their welcome and the pace rarely falters.
Much of what makes Austentatious sing is the chemistry between the performers and the visible joy they take in building a full narrative from a single audience suggested title. The ending can feel slightly rushed, but given there is no opportunity to plan or debate the story arc, the fact they manage to land it at all is impressive. On our night, the absence of the central female lead for the second half could have derailed things entirely, yet a fellow cast member stepped in and integrated into the plot effortlessly despite missing the entire first act set up.
As my guest neatly put it, this is a perfect show to gift friends or family. The showmanship is exceptional, with improvised lighting, live music and a violinist on stage supporting the action beautifully. The humour is clever, accessible and just the right side of lewd, which reliably wins over the whole room.
Austentatious returns to the Vaudeville Theatre for several dates across the first half of 2026 and it remains an easy recommendation for anyone in need of a guaranteed good night out.
The company that founded the first UnScripted Shakespeare Festival in New York City takes the Edinburgh Fringe by rambunctious, rhyming, pentametered storm.
New York based improv company Thorn and Petal Stick has been quick to show what they’ve got up their lacey Elizabethan sleeves at this year’s Fringe. And the pleasantest non-surprise of any deliciously good improv show? It’s different every night.
An unassuming company of four – fronted by actors Hal Munger and Nick Zimmerman, scored by musical virtuoso Sebastian Hochman, and designed and lit by Sasha Sokolova – Thorn and Petal Stick founded the first UnScripted Shakespeare Festival in New York. They’ve arrived in Edinburgh to pull all the plugs on a seemingly infinite jug of dramatic and downright silly fun. It’s honestly a relief that you can just wait twenty-four hours and watch these no-frills geniuses tear the house down all over again.
The real cherry on top of a ridiculously talented team of improvisers is that they do the whole thing in iambic pentameter. Over the course of an hour, the audience is subjected not only to the clopping dee-dums of ten-syllable verse lines but also shared lines, rhyming couplets, and even musical diddies. It really is spectacular work that makes you wonder if you haven’t just stumbled on a hidden gem of an act in the buzzing hive of late-night Fringe.
Sokolova’s set – a simple canvas littered with as-yet-unimbued objects – keeps the actors happily on their toes in a garden of rich prop-portunities. Likewise, her improvised lighting designs keep the story pummeling along, integral to marking the beginnings and ends of each improvisational chapter. Hochman – legs leisurely crossed in his corner of musical instruments – hilariously assumes the role of the omniscient town crier, often openly mocking his friends’ iambic stumbles and dressing each scene in its own tonally unique score so effortlessly, you wonder what he’d be capable of if he scooched his music-making station centre-stage.
The show comes fresh off of Munger’s and Zimmerman’s training at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, where they studied classical acting together. Apparently, the two met when Munger posted a notice on the school activities board for a nightly improvised Shakespeare group. At the first meeting, only one person showed up: it was Zimmerman. The rest is history.
With a whole run ahead of them this August, it’s exciting to imagine just how many improvised places they’ll be taking their contagiously funny Elizabethan vibrations – and how many new fans they’ll be picking up along the way.
Chock-full of charm and whimsy, it’s an unequivocal 5 star performance, and a must-see – again and again.
In Liverpool for the first time in its 16 years running, ‘Showstopper! The Improvised Musical’ is not to be missed, whether you run, walk, bus, taxi, or crawl your way there. I’ve given it 5 stars, which I would feel compelled to do even if the show had been terrible, purely out of awestruck respect for the company’s ability to create a musical out of nothing but thin air and ludicrous suggestions. Happily, this was not the case – the show was absolutely fantastic.
Running at a tight 50 minutes per act (I’m certain it must feel longer to those onstage), ‘Showstopper! begins with a phone call: a musical writer has a very short deadline to meet for a producer, and enlists the audience’s help in writing the show. Crowdsourcing suggestions for settings (“A&E on a Saturday night” having been sensibly vetoed from the off), music styles, and a title, we’re then full speed ahead into a musical journey with a staggering amount of coherence and arc, considering it’s all being made up on the spot.
My programme displayed a crowd of 19 actors and 10 band members – I’m not sure whether it’s a lucky dip per evening, but we got 5 fantastic actors who gave the impression of a full 20 or so people over the course of the evening, and 2 band members, a keyboard player and drummer. While I can’t help but wonder what it would have been like to have a cellist and trombonist in their place, I’m not sure we could have asked for better musicians: they provided a constant sense of steadiness, unflinchingly supporting the actors through raps or ballads as applicable, making it easy to forget that they too were constantly improvising.
It’s hardly worth giving an overview of the plot, since it will be entirely different over the show’s coming performances at the Playhouse (running until May 11th), but I feel it’s important to note that the show covered a massive breadth of musical styles and scenarios, from an Oklahoma!-esque song about the rules of cribbage to a love triangle battle in the style of Hamilton. Some versatile costumes and a relatively bare set, which made good use of different sized frames and entryways to create a variety of placements, worked well in the hands of the exceedingly capable actors, who managed an awful lot by way of only voices, miming and body language.
Special mention must go to actor Susan Harrison, who with the addition or subtraction of a hat snapped instantaneously into a variety of entirely different roles including polyamorous pensioner, member of the Lighthouse Family, and cat. Audience members were encouraged to tweet (or ‘post on X’) their suggestions for second act escapades during the interval, and the sporadic audience interjections were some of the best parts of the show – a solemnly-presented poem was named “I should have shared me Werther’s” by someone in the stalls, which really couldn’t have been better (nor could the actors’ ensuing recital of it).
This show felt like being at a birthday party as a 5 year old in the best way – chock-full of charm and whimsy, it’s impossible to take anything seriously while watching, apart from the very real possibility you might do yourself an injury by laughing. It’s an unequivocal 5 star performance, and a must-see – again and again.
Murder Inc Improv from Manchester are making their Edinburgh debut after 8 years of wowing predominantly northern audiences they’re here to make their mark.
On entry to the venue, audiences are asked to vote on locations for the show with the BIG TESCO winning out. Around the room are QR Codes (Fiddly because like most of Edinburgh data is spotty at best) but once achieved we’ve loaded a google form and figure out we’ll be participating too.
And then we’re off. An impressively slick and talented group take the stage, made up of:
Kate McCabe
Darryl Fishwick
David Stanier
Rob Gilroy
Harry May-Bedell
Jade Fearnley
The first half of the show we meet the characters (audience suggestions), explore intriguing scenarios such as Boss chats in the loo (also audience suggestions),, unicorn riding and lost property of children. Then the unthinkable happens, Dennis is murdered – a true who dunnit.
As an audience we are then invited to vote on who we think is the murderer and potential motives.
The improv returns and finally our killer is revealed.
It’s a madcap caper and the whole team are incredibly quick on their feet – accents and hilarious storylines propelling the show forward with laughter and speed.
For those of you who enjoy Improv you won’t be disappointed!
Perhaps I caught them on a bad night – regardless, this show needs work.
My mum nurses a soft spot for improv. I once had the privilege of witnessing her cry with laughter at a late night Fringe scratch show, where the disparate threads of increasingly absurd audience suggestions were spun into comedy gold before our eyes. Recently, I reviewed the inimitable An Improbable Musical at Hackney Empire. Ever my favourite proofreader, she told me it made her desperately want to see the show, but sadly the run was soon coming to a close. Imagine my delight when the opportunity to review an improvised one-act play by improv duo Hamza Mohsin and Jake Migicovsky, together forming Avocado Presents, presented itself – I gleefully asked her if she’d like to be my guest on her birthday.
We were handed a couple of flyers upon descending the stairs separating theatre and watering hole, The Curtain’s Up pub. Curiously, none of the glowing review quotations had been accredited to anyone, or even put in quotation marks. I recognised this trick immediately – I attempted it myself when first producing a show at university before being admonished by the director. Cripes.
A ‘one act play’ is a generous description of the series of divergent skits that followed. Rather than taking audience suggestions, which tends to lend a feeling of veritable spontaneity to improv, the duo just kind of vibed, which lent a feeling of an unrehearsed sketch show. Connecting themes, if any, seemed to be exploring traits of toxic masculinity, getting wasted and working out what to do with the broken chair from the set of the preceding show.
The main downfall seemed to be a flagrant ignoring of the first rule of improvisation, lesson one of any am-dram improv workshop: namely, the ‘yes, and’ rule. If someone throws an idea out into a scene – ‘Bill, your hair’s on fire!’, for example – all other parties should ideally rush for an imaginary bucket with which to douse the unfortunate Bill, rather than say, ‘no it’s not’. There are many exceptions to this rule, of course, which frequently do make for some of the funniest comedic moments, but it is the first rule for a reason. Hamza and Jake’s interactions were characterised by an overwhelming sense of negation, as opposed to the affirming ‘yes, and’ rule. While potentially riffing on themes of male conflict and friendship negotiated amid societal pressure to assert dominance and exert power, it mostly meant the scenes just didn’t go anywhere, and were frequently stopped in their tracks. This was epitomised by Hamza putting away the aforementioned broken chair, before Jake brought it back and insisted on fixing it. It decidedly could not be fixed, as he discovered in front of his bewildered audience.
A road trip interrupted by two policemen indeed provided an apt metaphor for the show. Ironically, this was the best of their scenes, containing fun moments which acknowledged the elements of surprise and play central to their work. As Jake whipped around to the other side of the vehicle to become a second officer, Hamza and his character’s reactions aligned with a mildly startled, ‘Oh, there’s another one’. Jake jumped back into his initial role, quickly establishing he had been too baked to participate much in the proceedings. ‘Is there a law, officer, against driving with a foot?’ he manages to ask (he had been driving with his foot), to the biggest laugh of the night.
However, they tended to fall back on these scenarios in which the comedy rested on their being drunk or high, exemplified by Jake pushing for there to be ‘something else’ in the suitcase on their road trip, with Hamza insisting there was just clothes, shoes and underwear in it. Again, this negation resulted in Jake’s pushing going nowhere, prompting him to reach behind his seat and magically find a leftover joint for them to smoke. Rejecting the literally infinite possibilities for the contents of that suitcase, and indeed for any number of weird and wonderful things that Jake might have stumbled across in his car, this simply comes across as lazy storytelling. I feel like I’m being quite harsh here. However, there are only so many opportunities for the flourishing of the lush, diverse multitudes of underrepresented, emerging talents in the comedy sphere, and these guys occupy one of those rare spaces. It’s time to shape up or move on.
Maybe the problem was I cared too much – they were pretty endearing, working hard to practise their craft, and clearly had talent – so it was frustrating when they simply never took off the ground. Perhaps a final few sketches would have provided this opportunity, but the night came to an abrupt end when, I sh*t you not, an improbably hammered audience member two seats down threw up over the row in front. Somewhat worryingly my mum laughed much, much harder at this than she had the entire evening. Next time, I’m taking her to see The Nutcracker.
Masterful improv entertains audiences from start to finish in a boisterous lost Jane Austen spectacle
The Regency comedy improvisation show, made famous at the Edinburgh Fringe, is on tour! Every single show promises to deliver a brand new ‘lost’ Jane Austen play based only on audience suggestions. The performers are all talented improvisers with a confidence that rivals the proud Mr Darcy and a stubborn doggedness that Elizabeth Bennett would be jealous of. Performed in period costume with a wonderful live musical accompaniment, this was a rambunctious evening full of laughter from every corner of the audience.
The concept was introduced by a learned scholar with the audience spitballing multiple titles such as Death with Dignity and F*nnying About before the cast settled on ‘Alice in Spinsterland’. I was a little disappointed that they didn’t leverage the Halloween theme (the show was on the 29th) and was a bit concerned that the references to Alice in Wonderland would become a bit monotonous. The cast managed it well but I did find there was heavy allusions to the Lewis Caroll book and unfortunately for my companion from Canada they weren’t well versed with the story so it meant some humour was lost in translation.
I’ve had the pleasure of seeing the show before in Edinburgh and can verify that this performance was indeed completely different – there’s no tropes (bar those of the Jane Austen influence) that were trotted out or rehearsed scenes that they desperately wanted to slot in. It’s truly organic, spontaneous and impressive improvisation that keeps the pace throughout. A small criticism would be the use of ‘flashbacks’ and ‘flashforwards’ – something I have witnessed before at amdram improv when I was at university, but to an unexperienced audience member it can feel a bit chaotic and disorientating if you’re not fully up to speed with improv etiquette.
At 1hr45 it was a fast paced ride and was engaging throughout. Best enjoyed with a glass of wine or sparkling appletister it’s a decadent rollercoaster of twisting turns and quick thinking. The ending was a little rushed as the cast realised the time but the show’s resolution was still incredibly clever – hard to believe it was thought of on the spot (but I promise it was!). True improv relies on the cast knowing each other well and being able to run with ideas and bounce off each other, fully trusting each other’s instincts. By this point, the cast of Austentatious are truly seasoned professionals so for a masterclass in improv and guaranteed giggles, find it at a venue near you!
Please stop what you’re doing, immediately, and go and see this show.
I’m not joking – it is imperative that you mime putting down your teacup, tie your imaginary shoelaces, have a think about what rhymes with ‘lackadaisical’ and run, don’t walk, to a world of musical improbability at the Hackney Empire.
Every night from the 21st – 26th October, Lee Simpson, Josie Lawrence, Ruth Bratt and Niall Ashdown are joined by puppeteers Aya Nakamura and Clarke Joseph-Edwards to spectacularly manifest the seemingly impossible: an entirely improvised, professionally produced, ninety-minute musical, complete with a live orchestra accompanying the actors’ frequent bursts into never-before-heard song. Luckily for us, this feat of theatre indeed turns out to be merely the highly improbable.
In a style familiar to those who have seen some form of improvised theatre before, particularly sketch shows, the production opens with the cast taking three suggestions from the audience. They first called for a ‘good place’ – an audience member shouted ‘Downing Street’, which our unruffled thespian rejected, on the basis that they had radically reinterpreted the definition of the word ‘good’. An herb garden became the winning suggestion here. Next, we were asked for a word that feels pleasant in the mouth to say out loud – ‘lackadaisical’ was successful, after some relaxed confirmation of its definition between the cast members (to not care, be apathetic, etc, if you were wondering). Finally, we were urged to provide a ‘beautiful sentence’, with some excellent nonsense being proffered in the form of ‘the murder was horrible, yet the wind whispered’.
Oh readers. I could tell you about the unparalleled joy of watching the live births of such musical delights as ‘Why Is My Dill So Ill’, ‘Dust Cake’, ‘Nobody Loves You’ and ‘Pick Your Herbs In Your Own Garden (Stay On Your Side Of The Fence)’. These all have the promise to be smash hits – that is, if they were ever to be seen on stage again. You will simply have to see what happens on your particular night, which is of course a great part of the fun.
Some of these theatrical births are more painless than others, although the ultimate roaring success of a section with a shaky start is genuinely thrilling to witness. After Nakamura and Joseph-Edwards, two hitherto less prominent cast members wordlessly played with items in a tea set for an anxiety-inducing length of time, a completely magical moment of realisation rippled throughout the theatre, as a teapot, saucer and three teacups became, improbably, wondrously, a thoroughly charming, abstracted puppet creature. Ashdown jumped in with a spiel about the plight of the last duckling in every brood to jump into the pond for the first time, and suddenly I found myself caring very much about the fate of, what had been moments ago, a collection of inanimate household objects.
There are the occasional highly funny fourth wall-breaks, in which our cast acknowledge the inevitable mistakes, inconsistencies, and ‘where the hell are we going with this’ moments that are part and parcel of improvising a coherent narrative to a live audience for an hour and a half. This has the effect of winning us ever more round to their side, with what could have been glaring inconsistencies transformed into humorous highlights of the performance. Nakamura leaves a scene taking place in a shed via multiple exits, which is immediately picked up on by the other cast members. They note the strangeness of new doors appearing in the garden infrastructure and ceremoniously dub her ‘the magical lady in the shed’, who becomes a significant character in the unfolding plot.
I particularly enjoyed the creative use of props accidentally left behind from previous scenes. A scrunched-up ball of brown paper from the preceding ‘Dust Cake’ number (formed by means of an old couple’s lackadaisical approach to housekeeping over 39 years, and which bizarrely turns out to have regenerative properties when eaten) becomes ‘the ancient pebble’, the meeting point for our two unfortunate murder victims. A dropped umbrella which previously functioned as a walking stick sparks a relationship-ending conversation between two characters who have let the weeds grow in their romantic life. Such is the feeling that there is truly nothing a song can’t be written about.
My companion and I clutched each other in the stalls throughout, mouths agape with delight, tears in our eyes from laughter. I truly could not recommend this show more highly – pure theatrical magic.
With improv becoming more and more popular as an art form, creatives are pushed to find ever engaging ways to evolve the trope. This time it’s a cast of quick thinking Shakespeare buffs who have taken on the challenge.
On entry audience members are given a small ping pong ball with a Shakepearesque word written on it, its purpose revealed in the opening moments of the show. To ‘pick’ the themes of tonight’s performance audience members are invited to chuck the balls into the girls britches and the successful balls will be used to determine the show.
Nobility
Gloves
Revenge
Dance
And with one last audience interaction:
Lovers
At the start the cast were stumbling over the archaic language, however cooly and confidently addressed the issue and played it into the show – a smart choice. The cast of Tom Wilkinson, Daniel South and Octavia Gilmore adeptly led the audience on a merry jape with multi-roling, cross dressing, murder and merriment for the next hour.
All were well seasoned and clearly on their game, even if corpsing did happen! Grumbles could come from the feeling that the theme is potentially a trope that they had done many times – the initial scenes being almost immediately prepared. Additionally the britches and skirts were almost so overworn that they became a distraction to the wonderful improv going on – perhaps some updated costumes would better serve the performers.
Overall, as with much improv it was a delightful hour of entertainment but with no real depth.
